LOYALTON — As coaches and players from the Tri-Valley League’s 11 football-playing schools gathered Monday at Upper Dauphin Middle School for some food and plenty of preseason football chatter, several things stuck out:

And even though Susquenita might be playing in the TVL for the first time after three-plus decades in the Mid-Penn Conference, first-year coach Mark Kirk has some familiarity with the programs his Blackhawks will be facing since he spent five seasons piloting a Halifax program (26-26) back to prominence.

“I actually cautioned the kids,” Kirk said. “When they first heard they were getting into the Tri-Valley League they like took a deep breath. Now I don’t have to play Cedar Cliff. … I said, ‘This is a really good league with really good coaches. You’ve got to be able to strap it up every Friday to play. You might be only playing against 30 kids instead of 60, but you better strap it up and be ready to go.’

“So I think we have them skewed in on how tough the competition’s going to be.”

Kirk’s final season at Halifax was in 1999, when the Wildcats finished 10-2 and reached the District 3-A title game, falling to Steel-High. Kirk then began a nomadic coaching existence that took him from Halifax to Shikellamy to Punxsutawney to Virginia to North Carolina to Oregon to Indiana and back to Pennsylvania.

After spending the past two seasons at Everett, Kirk is taking over a Susquenita program that last season finished with a 1-9-1 record.

“I like this league,” Kirk said. “This league’s fun. Good coaching. It’s a fun league to coach in. And you’re not going an hour-and-a-half to two hours for each game.”

As far as adding a 12th school — by upping the TVL membership to 12, divisions could be formed and scheduling would become much easier — all of the coaches on hand mentioned a number of schools they thought would be good additions.

Although Camp Hill was brought up by many of the TVL head coaches — Frank Gay’s Lions will take on Upper Dauphin and Halifax this season — other schools that were mentioned included Minersville and Penns Valley.

While the Upper Dauphin Middle School gymnasium is vacant prior to Tri-Valley League media day, players and coaches from all 11 schools would eventually fill the tables. (Michael Bullock, PennLive.com)

(2) As far as anointing a preseason favorite to win the TVL’s championship trophy, the consensus among those given a chance to choose a potential champion is there is no consensus pick. A number of schools were noted — Juniata, Newport, Upper Dauphin, Williams Valley — but no one received the outright nod.

Perhaps Upper Dauphin head coach Brent Bell put it best as he addressed the group before they began chowing down, using the words of late Mount Carmel skipper Joe “Jazz” Diminick to describe the small-school league’s annual competitiveness.

“It’s a heart attack league.”

And while Pine Grove skipped to the 2013 crown by side-stepping nine league opponents, Jeff Sampson’s Cardinals (10-1) lost 2,000-yard back Ryan Heim and a number of others and figure to be in a transition phase.

Our advice? Toss everyone into a hat, pull out one name and go from there.

“I tell everyone that this is probably the best league in the state because every night it’s a backyard rivalry and you just never know,” said first-year Halifax head coach Bob Folk, who spent six seasons at Newport.

“I think this year across the board it should be really competitive,” added Line Mountain’s Rodney Knock, who played in the league not all that long ago.

“I think it’s going to be a fight every Friday night,” quipped Sampson, who hopes to lead his Cardinals to a second straight crown. “There’s a lot of good football teams in this league.”

“Probably about three more years,” said Klingensmith, whose grandson, Fletcher Hart, is a sophomore wingback at Juniata. “Then I’ll step aside and let Mr. [Kurt] Condo take over.”

And while Klingensmith’s Indians may employ many of the same offensive sets they utilized in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the former Penn State fullback will have his team prepared for whatever stands in front of them.

What does have Klingensmith unsettled as he wheels into season No. 46 (263-193-6) is this: His Indians may not have a single home game. Seems Dietrick Field has been carved up by a company that’s dug more than 125 geothermal wells as a potential heating source for the high school that sits nearby.

“You drive by it now and it looks like a bomb went off,” Condo cracked.

The Indians (4-6) hope to be at home in October, but that remains to be seen.

“Our field right now is all torn up,” Klingensmith said. “They hope it’s ready by the second half of the season, but … I feel bad for some of these seniors who had dreams of finishing out their careers on Dietrick Field.”

Other takeaways from Monday’s preseason gathering:

*In addition to Susquenita’s Kirk and Halifax’s Folk, East Juniata’s Brent Hartman will lug Tri-Valley League experience into his new gig.

Hartman was an assistant coach under Simon Cameron last season at EJ (2-8) — Cameron has been deployed with the Pennsylvania National Guard and expects to return to the EJ sidelines at some point this season — after lengthy runs as an assistant coach at Lewistown and Indian Valley.

“It’s nice being back in the league again,” Folk said. “I love challenges and it’s going to be a challenge, which I enjoy doing. The good thing is that we’re young, so we can teach them the proper way of playing football.”

*Coming off a winless season (0-10), Halifax will hold its initial preseason practice at 12:01 a.m. next Monday morning under the stadium lights.

Offense will be the Wildcats’ initial priority until about 2:30 a.m., when Folk & Co. will break for some team activities and needed sleep (4:15-6:45). Once breakfast (7 a.m.) comes to a close, the Wildcats will return to the practice field at 8:30 for some defensive reps.

“It’s all about making some changes,” Folk said.

*While the Week 1 matchup between Tri-Valley (8-3) and Millersburg (3-7) may seem like business as usual to those associated with programs connected by Route 25, it isn’t since the two are meeting in a non-league scrap.

For Millersburg skipper Brad Hatter, the game carries plenty of meaning whether it’s a league scrap or not since he’s a Tri-Valley graduate. Hatter played for longtime Bulldogs head coach Mike Ulicny.

“It’s an interesting dynamic to coach against the guy I played for,” Hatter admitted. “Just a ton of respect for him and the things he brought to the program. Obviously, I’m trying to get some of those things into ours because one of the things I always appreciated about Tri-Valley is that we know they’re gonna play hard every night.

“And that’s what I want out of these guys. We’ll make no excuses, but we’ll show up and we’ll compete and we’re gonna play hard.”

“It’s a league opponent, but it’s not a league opponent,” Ulicny said. “It’s still a football game, it’s still a team that we’ve played for a long, long time so I don’t think it’s going to matter whether it’s a league game or not.

“It’s your opening game and you want to play the best you can, so that’s the game we shoot for.”

*As they head into the 2014 campaign, Williams Valley players and coaches will carry heavy hearts following the death of senior tight end Tony Rios in a July 13 automobile accident on U.S. 209, not far from his Muir home.

“We’re just gonna play for him and try to win them all,” running back Matt Miller said. “Do it for him. ‘Cause I know he’d be a good player this year. We could really use him. We’re gonna try to do it for him.”

“It takes the whole ‘play every down, it could be your last’ to an extreme,” Vikings head coach Tim Savage added. “You’re usually saying that for fear of injury or something simple like an eligibility list or grade problems.

“It’s never to this extreme. It does give me something extra that when I tell the kids, ‘If you’re hurt, you better be really hurt, ‘cause Tony’d be out there playing.’ “

*And for a Newport program (6-5) that reached the District 3-AA playoffs last season, one early non-league date has the Buffaloes’ full attention.

While Todd Rothermel’s club figures to be in the mix for a Tri-Valley League title — particularly since the Buffs have plenty of experienced beef up front — the ‘Port is really anxious to mix it up with Steel-High in Week 3 at the War Veterans' Memorial Stadium atop Cottage Hill.

“I’m excited to go play Steel-High, I really am,” Rothermel admitted. “I’m excited because traditionally they’re a very good program. They’ve won district titles. They’ve won state titles. They run a good program.

“If you want to be the best, you have to play the best, beat the best, whatever. So it’ll be a good experience for our guys to go down there.”